Posts tagged ‘China’

The Global Commoditiesdatabase provides a vast range of visual, manuscript and printed materials, sourced from over twenty key libraries and more than a dozen companies and trade organisations worldwide. These original sources will help scholars to explore the history of fifteen major commodities from about 1500 and to examine the ways that these have changed the world.

Since 2014, Leiden University Libraries are hosting a ‘Taiwan Resource Center for Chinese Studies‘. This resource center, established by an official agreement between the National Central Library in Taiwan (NCL) and the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) signed in 2014, will be the platform for Taiwan to promote and share both Taiwan and China studies with the faculty, scholars and students of Leiden University. The agreement, aimed to strenghten academic ties, resulted in a generous donation of books on all kinds of subjects relating to Chinese studies, and provides access to a wealth of digital Chinese resources.

The TRCCS book collection (here’s the list) which is continuously updated, can be found on dedicated bookshelves inside the East Asian Library Reading Room. All books are available for browsing and borrowing. Apart from printed works, staff and students of Leiden University have access to many electronic databases, hosted by the National Central Library in Taipei.

Here are two important ones:

The ‘Three History’ Set Lidai san tao 歷代三套:
Large database of historical works, divided into three sections: 1. Lidai huiyao 歷代會要 [total: 336 juan] Institutional Histories throughout the Ages; 2. Lidai Shihua 歷代詩話 [242 juan] Poetry and Verse throughout the Ages; and 3. Lidai fuhui 歷代賦彙 [total: 191 juan] Collected Poetic Prose throughout the Ages. Access from within the University campus.

Linking Publishing ebooks collection 聯經電子書Lianjing dianzi shu:
A collection of 270 ebooks on various topics including history, literature, economy, and arts and lifestyle. Although downloading these PDFs is not possible, all ebooks can be read from the screen. Access from within the University campus.

For a full list of available databases go to the TRCCS website and browse the ‘Resources’ section. There are a lot of interesting databases, of which below a small selection :

Digital Images 古籍影像檢索. Tick the box saying 是否有影像 on the search screen, then click”瀏覽影像” top left to view scanned books from the NCL, the Library of Congress, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, and others.

National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations 臺灣博碩士論文知識加值系統 (> 16,000 documents) This database provides access to indexes and abstracts in both Chinese and English of doctoral and master’s theses approved by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan since 1956.

Established in 1872, 申报 Shenbao (historically transliterated as Shun Pao or Shen-pao) was the most influential and longest lasting commercial newspaper of before the establishment of the People’s Republic. Published in Shanghai until 1949, Shenbao was founded by Englishman Ernest Major, but, uniquely, as a newspaper for Chinese readers, written by Chinese reporters. During its existence, Shenbao gradually shifted from a conservative to a more liberal perspective, and played a pivotal role in the formation of public opinion in the imperial period and into the tumultuous beginnings of modern China.

Published over eight decades of its existence, Shenbao’s content varies: politics, economics, history, cultural studies – literature, art, cinema. Shenbao is a standard source for late 19th and early 20th-century history. Its multicultural editors and correspondents’ claims can be keyed to any research whose objectives are global historical patterns of interaction and modernity or the resistance and reinterpretation of traditions. (more…)

We have access to Chinese Studies – Oxford Bibliographies, with Tim Wright (Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Sheffield) as editor in chief, and a board of editors and expert contributors who have written on the subject. The list of research fields is updated regularly.

The Bibliography in Chinese Studies provides an authoritative guide to the whole field’s key works and the most important scholarship in European languages as well as Chinese and Japanese. (more…)

Van Gulik Collection

Van Gulik’s collection is best known for its ancient Chinese novels, literature, and books on art and music (qin), and for its special publications like Japanese blockprints of Chinese works, studies on China and Japan, and a collection of congshu, Chinese ‘collected works’ or collectanea. (more…)

IMF eLibrary is easy to use, you can build your own queries and run specified data reports: (quote) “Data Reports helps users to easily build reports and charts covering many common IMF data topics. Predetermined country, topic, and data sources are available through the dropdown menus in the Data Reports tool. Query Builder allows users to develop a customized data search by filtering across country, concepts, and database sources to generate a report” (unquote). Read more from the IMF’s brochure [in PDF] Explore the new IMF eLibrary.

Our library has access to Airiti Journals 中文電子期刊服務資料庫, until 2016 known as TEPS 台湾电子期刊服务网 or Taiwan Electronic Periodical Services. The Airiti Journals are a collection with over 900 fulltext journals from Taiwan in the fields of humanities– including religion, philosophy, history, art, linguistics, literature, anthropology – and social sciences – including education. There are also journals in the field of medical science, natural sciences and applied sciences. Most of the journals are in Chinese, but there are also several journals in English. Use the search screen on the top left to search for articles or journal titles.

Most of the journals are roughly available from 2005, although some journal archives are from an even earlier date. Journals are published online within several weeks of their publication and are ordered by date, newest first.

All fulltext articles have a short abstract in Chinese and English, and are available to download as a PDF file using the red button saying ‘Download PDF’.

All journals are accessible from home for university students and staff with your ULCN username and password, through the ‘Find Databases’ option in the library catalogue, or else this link to Airiti Journals.